


recollections of a gardener

by Anonymous



Series: okurimono-dono [6]
Category: Evillious Chronicles
Genre: Diary/Journal, Gen, POV First Person, Relationship Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-14
Updated: 2020-12-14
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:00:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28067394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: scattered thoughts at the end of the world
Series: okurimono-dono [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1968400
Kudos: 15
Collections: Union Server of Evillious 24 hour ficjam





	recollections of a gardener

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Helping Hand

The world will end soon. I'm not sure how long we have left, but my purple dreams have woven themselves thicker and thicker each night. I see skeletal wolves prowling the blackened plains, stars burnt right out of the night sky, rivers of blood swallowing the pitiable corpses that strew the great empty spaces of Evillious. And I hear the bells ringing in the distance, mournfully tolling out their one hundred and eight peals.

I need to write this down before the world ends. Even if hellfire swallow these pages up tomorrow, or sulfur-stained rain dissolve them to ash. Before we all die I want to lay out what I know, maybe hammer out some answers to all these questions I have. I want to know about _her_.

I first met her in a darkened theater, as a doll no taller than my waist stared down at me with glassy eyes and swung her gavel, twice.

"Lowly man, Gammon Octo. You are hereby sentenced to death for the crime of being guilty."

The scene was almost like a comic farce. From the piled up boxes that made for a makeshift judge's bench to the old, rusting iron chairs littered with trash on the sides. From the fact that a little doll had just sentenced me to death on the crime of "being guilty" to the fact that two fourteen-year-old children were giggling gleefully from the edges of the room, shouting for my death in high-pitched voices. I couldn't believe any of it was real.

But then I felt the pain inside me, hot and tightly bound up, searing bright blue scars into my stomach. I saw the doll's dead eyes look back at me as disinterested as a fish. And I heard the loud laughing of the children, their exclamations and quick, excited whispers.

And I closed my eyes and tried as hard as I could to accept my death. Even if it was to be in such a painful and laughable manner.

"Stop."

Another voice, ringing out through the hollow chamber. The searing pain going away in an instant, as if I had never been burned at all. And the mildly annoyed whimpers of the male child, shushed by his sister.

"I'll be taking him. I need a helping hand for all my chores."

I look up and she's standing in front of me, her eyes boring straight into my chin. I tilt my head down slightly to look at her and receive a firm stomp on the foot. I fall down, clutching my foot in my hands to try and ease the pain.

"Don't look down at me, you tall oaf. On your knees, now."

She's looking down at me now, and I see her face is identical to the female twin in the corner. She brushes a strand of golden hair from her eyes and frowns.

"What would you be good for? Gardening?"

Without waiting for an answer, she looks up at the ceiling thoughtfully.

"Yeah, you're the Gardener now. Grab some shears and get to work, weed boy."

Not knowing what to make of the situation, I quickly got up and left the room.

"The shed is that way, dumbass!" I hear her calling after me, and then the soft mechanical voice of the doll, murmuring something inaudible from how far away I am. I stumble around the theater and find a little room filled with bookshelves, and collapse there, terrified and exhausted and confused.

I think I went to sleep after that, I'm not sure. But all I remember since then is pretending to tend to the theater's garden with two pairs of scissors that never seemed to be able to be washed fully of their bloodstains. There are no flowers to tend to in the garden. Only gnarled weeds and strange stumps, but at least if I make myself busy trimming the leaves the woman in red eyes me a little less hungrily.

I tried to escape once in the first few weeks, but the moment I set foot out of the theater I felt wrong. Guilty. Like I was a child who had eaten too many sweets and had been caught red-handed. I walked not twenty paces into the trees before I realized the forest was humming. A low, angry sound. The trees towered above me, their branches carving up the night sky in some places, covering it entirely in others. They seemed to weave closer together, twisting and contorting into shapes I was sure no tree would naturally grow into. I continued on my path, trying to walk in a straight line as best I could, but then the trees cleared and I see the old clocktower before me again, the walls shining dully under the crescent moon's light. The forests' humming had ceased completely, and no sound cut through that inky night. Everything silent, and though I could see the dull blue of the theater walls and the ebony wood around the clock the world felt monochrome, like I was in a movie.

She was there, smiling, waiting for me.

"Don't try that again," she warned. "You have to be my helping hand, remember?"

After that I didn't try escaping again. But the perfect stillness came back, at times. Some nights when a full moon shone and I was out pretending to cut at weeds with old, bloodstained scissors, I would start to realize the deathly stillness was all around again, the world drained of color and sound. And some nights, if I looked back then, I could see a lonely figure at the top of the clocktower, staring up at the moon and the stars. And if she turned and left, I could glimpse the cold light coming off her golden hair. Sometimes I wonder what she saw, or if she was watching anything in particular. Maybe she was just waiting, again. She seems to be waiting quite a lot of the time.

In some respects though, she was just like any other fourteen-year-old kid. She raced around with the twins, whom I had come to know simply as the Servants, and tossed around a small reddish ball in what looked like a keep-away game. The woman in red would look on from a distance, sipping at the wine in her cracked glass, always holding her lacy umbrella. If I squinted hard enough, they almost looked like a family of four on an outing. But then I looked just a little too long at her and saw something in her eyes I didn't really understand beyond the fact that it was intensely sad. And even though she laughed and ran around and loudly boasted of her skill at ball games, that look never really left her. I always had to be careful not to stare too long though, because then the woman in red would stare back, and lick a drop of crimson wine from her lips. I always hated it when she did that.

There were others in the theater besides her, the Servants, the woman in red, and the doll. There was a lonely echo who lived up in the clocktower, reduced to nothing but wistfulness and regret. There was a tall, thin man who always smiled just a little too wide and an even taller man who would glare at everyone from his chef's outfit. And of course, sometimes Kayo passed through.

Kayo Sudou was a screenwriter, or so she proclaimed. Apparently she had been the Gardener long before I had come to the theater. Now, relieved of her duties, she had plenty of free time to travel the world and find new inspiration for her movies. Every so often she would come in and screen one of them and we would all sit in and watch. Her movies always confused me, and I have no idea where she found the actors or the funding to produce one of them. But the dialogue always felt stilted, unnatural, and the actors wooden and forced. I found them disconcerting and somewhat bland, but it was still better than the way I spent most of my time in this place.

But whenever Kayo came around _she_ was nowhere to be seen. Her voice, which so often rang down the halls in its arrogant timbre, would be conspicuously absent from the theater. Even after Kayo left, it would often be one or two days before she reappeared, traipsing around the building like she'd never been gone at all. The other inhabitants never showed any indication that they noticed her absence or reappearance, and I didn't want to ask. Once I climbed the clocktower and brought up her and Kayo to the Gear who churned there, but he didn't seem interested in talking about anything besides the doll director or the stars.

I've written all this down, but I still don't understand anything about her. Why did she choose me to be her helping hand? Why is she so arrogant? Why does she pretend to be so invulnerable? And who or what is she waiting for?

This hasn't been helpful at all. I've written this for nothing---the world will surely end before she divulges any of her secrets. I didn't even get any catharsis from writing this out. Just more confusion I have no time to untangle. Tomorrow, or perhaps next week, or perhaps next year, the world will end. And I am sitting here penning this confusing, messy account that explains nothing.

...

Perhaps one last thing should be included here, if only for completeness's sake.

Last night I had another dream. It was purple, but a different hue than the others. I saw the theater floating in the sky, then a black box, then the church bells, tolling thrice. I saw a glass maze that imprisoned a great queen. I saw a great city burned to ash. And in the end, I saw a single old nun, kneeling in the briny sea and staring up at the stars.

...

I wonder why she looked so familiar?

**Author's Note:**

> By Gift (@okurimono-dono.tumblr.com)


End file.
